Vituperate
by VillainousVexation
Summary: Movie!verse. Right before Evey walks out on V. It's hard to say goodbye through silence. MASSIVE SMUTTY ANGST. Oh, such angsty smut. Heed the rating.
1. Point One

'Perhaps to many readers this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's debacle.'

- Alphonse Daudet

It was such a simple thing, silence. It eased into the cracks in V's mind and soothed him. It smoothed over the nightmares that kept Evey awake. So simple, and yet it had insinuated itself into every part of their lives. Such a simple thing, and it muffled all their problems. The silence was so loud, there was no more room for thought.

They didn't talk about Evey's packing. They didn't talk about V's increasingly long hours away from the Gallery, preparing for the Fifth. They didn't talk about the turmoil going on aboveground. They didn't talk about the danger.

They didn't talk about the times their bodies crashed together almost without their consent. They didn't talk about the cell. They didn't talk about how time seemed to be racing forward. Most of all, they didn't talk about the silence. It had descended between them, and it would not be lifted.

V had stopped questioning the silence. He did not understand how Evey could so completely control him. A look from her could drop him to the ground. He did not allow himself to think about the times he would lose himself in her. A smile from her made him feel real. It was ridiculous, really; a revolution was being planned, and he was worrying about his relationship. If you could call it that.

He knew something was wrong with what they had - whatever it might be. More accurately, he would have been hard-pressed to find anything right in what he shared with Evey. It baffled him. It disturbed him, in a way he could not specify even to himself.

He loved her. That was not even worth mentioning, although it affected everything he did. He loved her completely, terrifyingly. He would have died for her. He would die for her. He would give her everything he had, everything he was, for just one more moment in her presence. That didn't make it right.

V had no firsthand experience of love. Although the edges of memories would sometimes slip across his mind, they were momentary flashes of sex, and ultimately meaningless. His knowledge of love existed entirely within the realm of books and films and music. And while he knew, with every twisted fiber of his being, that he loved Evey, he still knew something was wrong.

V had always envisioned himself more like Mr. Darcy than the Marquis de Sade. Having no prior knowledge, he had assumed that perhaps one part of him might be more conventional. But whenever he walked away from an encounter with Evey, he felt sick. Diseased and dirty, in a way that was utterly foreign to him.

It wasn't the sex. Despite his enforced chastity, V had never been a prude. He was smart enough to know that his own desires were not as bizarre as he liked to believe. Unusual, yes; extraordinary, no. No, when his body joined with Evey's, he felt no shame or guilt. Being in her arms soothed him. It wasn't the physical act that caused him pain.

It was after. V's whole life was before and after: before V, after Five. Before Valerie. After Larkhill. Before the burns. After Guy. Before Evey. After the Fifth. After V. Now there was before sex, and after. Of all the divisions in his life, this one was the hardest to comprehend.

V had never been a sexual creature. He hadn't the inclination, or the opportunity. For twenty years his entire focus had been on his revolution, the Gallery, revenge. His private, lonely moments of self-gratification had been infrequent.

Then Evey had entered his life, and brought with her a whole new type of anarchy. One which he viewed with suspicion, if not open distrust. He had become intensely aware of his own presence, of the way his body moved and how she reacted to him. Even before he had ever touched her, she had created something within him that lacked a name, or control.

For the first time in his life, V had felt lust and tenderness, emotions that alarmed him with their intensity. Love continued to be beyond analysis, beyond even simple comprehension.

V had loved, in a way, before Evey. He loved Valerie in a complicated and and conflicted way, but he had never had to face her. He knew Valerie better than anyone on earth, but he had never met her. Such distinctions had made loving her safe, easy.

Emotions were new to V. For twenty years he had claimed only a small number. Rage, of course. Sometimes grief. Amusement and affection, on rare occasions. Beyond Valerie, he had no emotional investment in any other creature on earth. His love had been solely for her. Unrequited, on one level. Academic, in the most intimate way possible. And thoroughly safe. The one thing in his life that lacked danger.

Evey was not safe. All sharp edges and rough words, Evey had never been safe. Evey was desire and love and loss and fury and fear and heartbreak. Evey was blindingly, excruciatingly human and alive.

V didn't know what to do. He didn't want these feelings. They hurt him, in the one place where scars had been welcomed. He tried to reject the feelings, kill them, or block them out. They made him weak. They made him small. They made him doubtful and unsure. They made him human. And he craved them almost as much as he longed for revenge.

That was part of the problem. During - because with before and after, there must be a during - he never thought. He was too caught up in the moment, a creature of sensations and desires. In many ways, he was free. But after, his mind came roaring back in a way he had come to dread.

They disgusted him, these emotions and reactions. Who was that hesitant, cringing creature forcing his diseased and disfigured body onto a hurt and angry woman? Why couldn't that thing see how useless this all was? He was clinging desperately to the last strands of an aborted life, when he should be preparing for the end of everything. It was the worst, most dangerous form of denial.

But even that wasn't what damaged him. That wasn't what made him short with Evey, and filled him with loathing over what he had become. It was something far simpler; something that made him crave the silence.

It was him. His needs. His desires. His fantasies. He never hurt her, when they were together. He didn't think he could. Sometimes her actions bordered on violence, but V was never cruel. Not to her.

He wanted to be. With his hands on her body, he would envision pain and smell blood. He didn't want to hurt her. Not Evey. He wanted to hurt himself. He was hurting himself. Denial wasn't working anymore.

He wanted to mark her, leave some proof on her body of his brief ownership. He wanted that moment to hurt her, scar her forever. He wanted to cement their union, the connection that had been forged between them through flesh. And for V, union meant pain.

V did not have a romanticized view of pain. He couldn't possibly. But it aroused him in a way that gnawed incessantly at his sense of self. He wanted her to hurt him. He would hurt her for one brief moment, mark his place on her body, and she could spend an eternity destroying him. Her nails in his flesh, her teeth digging into his skin, her muscles clenching torturing him exquisitely - it seemed an appropriate fee for such pleasure. Nowhere near how much it would end up costing him.

Sometimes V felt that the only way to get through to Evey, to share himself and let her know how he truly felt, would be to kill her. Slash her throat while they made love, at the height of her orgasm. And in doing so, he would kill himself, collapsing bleeding and dead onto her still twitching body. It was a thought - somewhere between a fantasy and a nightmare - that haunted him when he least expected it.

There was something very, very wrong with his love. Like every other aspect of himself, V's love was a poison. A virus. In touching Evey, letting his diseased flesh come into contact with hers, he was spreading the sickness of his own fantasies.

His love was not pure and kind and selfless. It was neither tender nor sweet. V's love was violence and gunpowder and chaos. V's love was hurt and regret and death. V's love was another form of torture.

He would resolve not to touch her, usually when he could still smell her on his skin. She was leaving. So was he. It should have been simple. Things used to be simple - of that he was sure. And he had survived horrors beyond comprehension.

But then she would look at him. Or touch him. Or call out to him. And he would fall. He would find himself tangled up with her, making Evey scream with pleasure, and wonder at what moment this had begun.

And when it finally ended, he didn't want her to leave. He needed her to leave. She needed to leave. It was essential that she walk away. That didn't make the idea sting any less.

Soon he would be gone. He would follow Valerie to whatever followed this life. All this would be left behind. It was a comfort he allowed himself to dwell upon. His own death was was something he viewed with a grim pleasure.

But Evey would live. He needed to ensure that. Evey would live, and there would be other men. Men who could smile at her. Men who could meet her eyes with nothing between them. Men with names. Men with futures.

This too was a source of comfort, albeit a bittersweet one. He did not want to survive Evey. Nor did he expect her to mourn him as he would have her. He had accepted that other men would share Evey's bed, know her body as he did.

But he could not bear the idea that there would be no proof of his time with her. V wanted to know that Evey would carry some mark of their struggles. Not out of vanity; simply as evidence that someone had been capable of touching him so deeply. She hadn't felt what he had felt. If he was gone, there was nothing left.

V carried many people on his body. There was Stanton, her initials on every strand of the virus still within him. Under scar tissue born from the fire, there were still memories of beatings. He carried with him the guards who had raped him. Prothero's taser. The Chanceller's laws. The Bishop's complicity. Valerie and the fire he had built in her honor. A Viking funeral. Should have been his own.

There were no scars of kindness on him. Evey had no scars from him. None that he could see. Even that detective had marked her, in a way. The scar on her forehead was proof. Proof of her courage, of their real beginning. Proof, perhaps, that she cared for what he believed in. Maybe even believed in him.

The bruises from her torture were almost gone. There was no mark on her body that even hinted at how desperately he loved her. It was almost like none of it had ever happened.

V was in his study, alone with his thoughts. He could hear Evey moving around somewhere in the Gallery. Maybe packing. Maybe washing his scent from her skin.

V knew his love was not returned. After what he had done, it baffled him how Evey could even look at him. She claimed not to understand, and he believed her. For her, their coupling was not about love. It was purely about revenge. In for a penny. Penny for the Guy.

It made it easier for him to love her, the knowledge that his feelings were not reciprocated. However she might remember him, it would not be with regret. To be remembered by her at all was enough. It had to be - there was nothing else.

Evey stood in the doorway of the study, watching V as he watched nothing. The mask had been focused on a point on the wall for several moments. She leaned against the door frame, smiling tenderly at his back. Even his posture expressed how deeply he was lost in thought. She couldn't blame him. The bits of information she had about the Fifth spoke of upcoming chaos. And he would be the director.

Evey had finished packing. She had taken an inordinate amount of time, making sure she had everything that might remind V of her. She wanted to be forgotten. Still, she was amazed by how little it all amounted to; she could fit their entire history into one bag.

'I'm leaving tomorrow,' she said softly. Across the room, V nodded without facing her. Her voice didn't surprise him. He could always tell the moment Evey entered a room.

'Yes. It is time, isn't it?' His tone was carefully controlled to sound mild; it infuriated her.

'Right,' she said shortly. 'I'll leave you to it, then.' She moved to leave. V finally turned to face her.

'I am not currently occupied,' he murmured. Evey stopped. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Evey walked to him, seating herself on a small couch near V's enormous desk. She could see her reflection clearly in the highly polished wooden surface. V folded his hands and looked at her.

She was still far too thin, as far as he was concerned. And she was still moving a bit gingerly, due to her shoulder. Recent activities had probably slowed down her recovery, he noted silently. Evey had circles under her large brown eyes.

But V thought she was beautiful. Perfect. Her shorn head accentuated the bones in her face, and the pale complexion of her skin. She had found a simply, short-sleeved white dress in one of the Gallery's closets. It hung modestly at her knees, managing to minimize how frail her legs looked. V thought she was perfect.

They sat for several minutes, simply looking at each other. Neither moved. Evey was trying to memorize every detail about V: the way his hair gleamed in the dull light, the controlled power in his stance, the way his clothes moved along his body, and the way the mask seemed to see her from every possible angle.

The silence began to weight down on them. Evey was desperately trying to figure out what she could possibly say to the man in front of her. For once, it was V who broke the silence.

'You have everything you require?' he asked. Evey stared at him for another moment.

'Yeah, I should be OK,' she replied. V nodded once, apparently satisfied. More silence.

'Do you want me to leave?' Evey blurted out suddenly, her voice seeming shrill to her own ears. V shook his head once, emphatically.

'Not at all,' he assured her. Evey gave him a weak smile.

'I meant the room.' She picked at the hem of her dress. V smiled behind the mask.

'As did I.' He started to speak again, then stopped.

V knew that if he did nothing, instigated nothing, she would leave without ever touching him again. No marks. No proof of the past few months. The weight of what would not be spoken nearly knocked the wind from his lungs. Without saying a word, or offering any sort of explanation, he carefully peeled off his gloves.


	2. Point Two

Evey didn't care that her jaw dropped when V began to ease the gloves off of his hands. It was too intimate. Too graphic. She had never seen him take the gloves off of his own volition. Before, the gloves had been taken off by her, or at her request. He had never initiated that, even in the moments when he was already pressing his body against hers. This was unreal.

'V?' She couldn't place the tremor in her own voice.

'Yes?' he replied, his tone bizarrely conversational.

'Your gloves.' Evey had no idea how to otherwise express her alarm.

'Yes,' he agreed with a soft, humorless chuckle. He neatly folded the gloves on top of his desk. Then he clasped his bare hands together and regarded her once again. Evey looked around the room, as if expecting an explanation from the piles of books surrounding them. They offered no clue.

'Why?' she finally asked. V gave her the tiniest shrug.

'They have ceased to have a point at this juncture.' He looked down at his mottled, uneven hands. Evey stared at them, trying not to remember those hands all over her body.

'Do you want to talk?' she asked reluctantly. He had no fingernails. She had known that for ages, but never had the opportunity to to examine them in detail. V didn't seem to notice, or mind.

'Not particularly.' V moved his gaze to his hands. It was an unusual situation; he found his hands to be the most disfigured part of his entire body. The colors alone still gave him pause every once in a while, even after twenty years. Yet they were the only part of him she had ever seen, or would ever see. He had come to loathe them so much that they didn't seem to belong to him. But they were the only part of him she could see and identify. He bit back the beginnings of a nervous giggle.

'So, we'll just sit here.' Evey's voice cut through the panicky thoughts that were threatening to overwhelm him. V nodded.

'Apparently.' He was in no mood to fight with her. Not now. Unfortunately, Evey didn't share this sentiment.

'Are we not talking about something in particular?' Evey was surprised when V let out an abrupt snort.

'That is a problematic question.' He tried to speak again, but was trying not to lose himself in hysterical laughter. Evey raised an eyebrow, unnerved.

'I'll take that as a yes,' she muttered. V regained control of himself, and tapped his folded fingers together absently.

'Concurrence and silence do not imply the same thing,' he retorted. V mainly said it to make Evey give him that exasperated look. She did.

'It's a bit late for riddles, isn't it?' Her tone was sadder than he had expected, or could explain. It sobered him up immediately.

'Yes. It is.' He sighed. 'You look very beautiful tonight.' Evey barely let him finish.

'Don't.' V tilted his head, puzzled.

'I was simply stating a fact. Nothing more, nothing less.' Evey sighed, running her hand over the short stubble on her head. The gesture fascinated V.

'Do you want me to leave?' Her voice had taken on a softer, weaker tone.

'I don't know,' he replied honestly. Evey gave him that same weak smile.

'I meant -'

'I know what you meant,' he snapped, with more intensity than he had intended. Evey regarded him intently.

'You seem angry,' she noted quietly. V paused, pondering her words.

'Perhaps I am,' he admitted reluctantly. 'I have no interest in determining such a fact, however.'

Evey wanted to touch him. He seemed so far away, so small. She clenched her hands into fists.

'What happened?' She had once again lost the anger that kept her whole and separate from him. Now she merely wanted the answers.

'I tortured you.' His tone was fierce, his words final. Pronouncing his own death sentence.

'You think it's as simple as all that?' Evey was amazed. She knew V could be cheerfully oblivious, but this was flat denial. Almost aggressive ignorance.

'Yes.' V really wanted to change the subject. But Evey had that hard glean in her eyes that he had come to know so well in the past few days. And short of throwing her back into that cell, she would not be deterred.

'That explains everything else that's happened?' Her voice was becoming shrill.

'The influence of your experience cannot be overstated.' V hoped that Evey would not ask why. He was not ready to tell her about his own experiences. He would, before she left. But V wasn't quite ready.

'It can be overstated,' she snapped. V cracked his knuckles. Evey jumped.

'How so?' he inquired, adopting that mild tone that meant he was severely uncomfortable.

'You think everything I've done is because of what happened in that cell,' she stated flatly. V averted his eyes. She seemed like a damning angel.

'It is a compelling argument,' he responded quietly. Evey swallowed, reining in her anger.

'What if I told you I'd been having those thoughts for ages?' The question struck V dumb for a moment. He was tempted to ask her to describe what thoughts she was referring to. But that would have been merely procrastinating; he knew all too well.

'Are you likely to say such a thing?' he inquired politely. Evey sighed, and actually moved closer to him. The gesture was meant to capture his full attention, but it merely drove V to further distraction.

'V. I'm trying to be serious.'

'I would doubt the sincerity of such words,' he said gravely. Evey felt a bit dizzy; the reflection of the mask was staring at her just as intently as the definite article.

'Why would I lie?' she shot back. V had to admit, at least privately, that she had a point. She could not benefit from claiming such affections - at least in no way he could perceive.

'The question of 'why' is one best not applied to the current circumstances.' V couldn't tell if she was getting closer, of if he was leaning towards her.

'You're quite fond of euphemisms, aren't you?' Evey had meant for her words to be harsher; instead, they came out as an almost affectionate statement. V's smile could be heard in his every word.

'At the moment, they seem to be quite useful.'

'Would it be that bad to talk about what's happened?' Evey asked plaintively. V considered the question.

'Yes.' Evey wondered for a moment if this was what it felt like to pound your head repeatedly against a brick wall. She decided that this was worse - at least if you hit your head hard enough, you lost conscious.

'You're certain?' she asked, defeated.

'Do YOU want to talk?' V offered reluctantly.

'No!' Evey exclaimed. V nodded.

'Nor do I.' Evey put her head in her hands. V's eyes raked over the exposed flesh of her neck and arms.

'So we'll just pretend it all away,' she sighed. V made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort.

'That would be an exercise in impossibility,' he replied dryly. His hands unclasped, and began to draw absent circles on the shiny surface of the desk with his fingertips. Evey's eyes followed them.

'Then what are we doing?' Evey almost begged.

'Accepting.' V's eyes met hers through the mask. He felt that need, that urge, to possess and claim, bubbling up inside him. He looked away without moving the mask.

'Accepting?' Evey sounded doubtful.

'Some things cannot be explained by anything, no matter how the parties involved might wish otherwise. I cannot perceive a point in analyzing such futility.' V was put off when Evey laughed.

'This from a man who's planning on changing the world.' Evey smiled faintly as she spoke. V found the gesture extremely distracting. Still, he managed a soft chuckle.

'There is no ambiguity in revolution,' he stated with finality. Evey was not convinced.

'Not to you. What about everyone else? Some people think you're a hero. Some people think you're the antichrist.' V nodded at her words.

'I know. An intriguing ambiguity.' Evey smacked the desk lightly, annoyed.

'And that's not ambiguity?' she challenged.

'Of course it is. However, it is an ambiguity that I am quite comfortable with.'

'So it's about comfort!' Evey exclaimed triumphantly. V cocked his head.

'What are you trying to accomplish?' His voice was like a caress. Evey was torn between screaming at him until he broke, or tackling him and grinding herself against him on the cold stone floor. Instead, she answered him.

'I'm looking for closure, I guess.'

'You are looking in the wrong place,' he warned quietly. Evey nodded.

'No happy endings, right?' V shook his head, his bare hands tracing an unconscious 'v' on the table between them.

'No endings at all.' Evey couldn't deal with the enormity of that. That perhaps this fucked-up disaster would never stop. That her whole life would be defined by these few months was hard to accept. Particularly because she suspected he was right.

'I've never seen you without your gloves for so long,' she said. It was a weak attempt to change the subject, but V seemed quite eager to let the previous topic drop. He raised up his hands and looked at them critically, as if seeing them for the first time.

'Do they offend you?' He tried to make the question almost humorous, or at least disinterested. But Evey seemed depressed by the question.

'You know they don't.' There was the thin edge of a warning in her voice, an unspoken suggestion not to pursue this.

'No, I don't,' said V sharply. 'Your perception of what you see does not have guaranteed accuracy.' Evey glared at him.

'You've never given me a chance!' The words burst out before Evey could stop them. V answered with anger in his own voice.

'What would the purpose be? There is no future!' V stopped, taking a long breath. 'Not for what has happened here.'

'What happened here, V?' Evey asked quietly.

'A temporary reprieve, for one of us.' The anger was gone; Evey could see it slip out of his body, to be replaced by a sort of weary acceptance.

'And the other?'

'Exorcism of demons.' Her demons, he added silently. Let her spend all her hate on him, and enter the real world clean. If she would not carry him on her outside, he did not want to sully her insides.

'You're using a lot of words and not saying anything,' she chided gently. V watched her slender shoulders tense up.

'There is a point...' V stopped, shook his head as if clearing some of the cobwebs, and started again. 'There is a point at which language is useless. We are beyond that point.'

'You think there's a point where there's no point in talking? YOU?' Evey sounded supremely amused.

'Yes,' V answered. Evey was quiet, digesting this. When she spoke next, she knew how dangerous a line she was walking.

'Do you think Valerie would be happy with what you've become?' The question required V to sit in silence for nearly a full five minutes. Evey waited patiently. Although towards the end, she began to wonder if perhaps V was simply not going to speak until she left.

'That is what one would call a 'non sequitur,'' V finally answered. Evey nearly hit him.

'Don't change the subject! Tell me. How would Valerie feel about all this? How would Valerie feel about the killing and torture and me?' V hesitated again, but not nearly as long. His tone had become mechanical, robotic.

'Valerie would feel nothing. She's dead.'

'She's also a figment of your demented imagination,' Evey snarled. V leaned back in his seat. His fingers began tapping out the notes to Beethoven's 'Fifth.' He didn't seem to notice.

'Ah.'

'So that exempts you from responsibility?' she persisted. V was developing a headache.

'I am responsible for everything.' He knew he was being terse, but as far as he was concerned Evey was now verbally assaulting him. And oddly enough, it wasn't making the idea of her leaving any more comforting.

'You really mean that, don't you?' And once again, her voice had swung back from rage and disgust to concern and sorrow. V didn't know how people could deal with such extreme emotions on a daily basis. In the few months he had experienced them, they had nearly killed him.

'I rarely say things I don't mean.' His voice was trailing off. He was far more interested in the way the light glinted in her eyes, and the soft fullness of her lips.

'But you often say things that don't mean anything,' Evey pointed out. V was amused.

'My answers used to frighten you.' Evey stood up and began pacing. V watched her, fascinated.

'So you're doing this for my sake?' The sarcasm in her voice was thick enough to slice through.

'Yes.' V decided brevity was wise under the circumstances.

'Don't give me that shit. This is about you. About what you think I need.' Evey spun sharply, the dress spinning around her slender hips.

'This is about doing what is necessary. Emotions do not come into the equation.' If he had expected this to calm Evey, V was sorely disappointed.

'This is ALL about emotions, V!' Her voice echoed through the Gallery.

'It should not be so,' V said softly. Evey closed her eyes for a moment, willing herself to be calm.

'But it is.' V nodded in agreement.

'And soon you will leave, at which point the argument will be purely academic.' He did not sound remotely pleased with the idea.

'Do you believe that?' Evey was suddenly close to him again, close enough to touch. She leaned over him, her face flushed with emotions, her hands palm down on the desk.

'I can hope for such an occurrence.' Evey's hand was suddenly on his, lightly caressing his knuckles. V watched the diseased, damaged flesh respond underneath her long fingers.

'What are you doing?' he whispered, pushing his hand against hers. Evey's fingers dug lightly into his wrist, continuing to run her fingers over his like he was a finely-tuned machine.


End file.
